


Not Quite A Video Game

by adhddyke



Series: Not Quite A Video Game- Zombie Apocalypse Survivor AU [1]
Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, Alternate Universe- Modern Setting - Freeform, And Richie and Eddie are apocalypse-married, Cannibalism, Except there are very little zombies, F/M, Grief, Let's Kill This Fucking Clown, M/M, Mild Angst, Mild Violence (I think?), Slight philosophical and ethical questioning, Slightly chaotic narrative, Stupid humour at times because they're emotionally stunted, They don't die don't worry, They're all like twenty, Though that's not really relevant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-23
Updated: 2019-09-23
Packaged: 2020-10-26 20:53:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20748572
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/adhddyke/pseuds/adhddyke
Summary: Whilst trying to survive a zombie apocalypse, Richie and Eddie are lured and abducted by a madman cannibal dressed as a clown. But they aren't the only ones who this Bob Gray is keeping on his flesh farm, and since they're all survivors, they do what they do best: survive.





	Not Quite A Video Game

**Author's Note:**

> Concept: yay, execution: nay ! Feel like I rushed this a bit but I couldn't really improve it if I tried, apocalypse isn't really my horror scene and I'm not having a good time at trying to focus on any writing today! Hope you enjoy though! I always underestimate my work so for all I know this is fucken Shakespeare

"Oh, fuck!" are the two wonderful words Richie wakes up to one morning, in what's probably Spring, hiding out in some old middle school in a state his boyfriend Eddie had insisted was New York, but Richie isn't sure, since there’s a forest right by them, and he hasn’t heard about forests in New York. They've been walking since they were fifteen, five years ago, since the dead had also started walking. The best part is Richie gets to do all the travelling he never could have afforded growing up. The worst part is the fact not dying has grown a near difficult task. 

"What's going on?" Richie asks. "The world ended or something?" 

"I think we're going to die," Eddie replies, grabbing the nail-bat from beside Richie's head. 

"I've thought that for five years, Eds," he says. "What are you doing with good old Batilda?" 

"We're surrounded, you big idiot," Eddie hisses, pulling Richie out of his sleeping bag and shoving their small array of home decor into his backpack. With a frown, suddenly terrified, Richie runs to one of the barricaded windows, looking out of the peephole. Indeed, there are zombies around the school, limping and running and groaning and rotting. Soon they will break in. They always manage to eventually. 

"But there weren't any for miles and miles when we got here," Richie can sense there's something off about it all. He fiddled with the wedding ring on his hand. He and Eddie had taken them a couple of years back, saying the vows they remembered, making them apocalypse-married. Fiddling with the ring has become a comfort and a habit. 

"They're at every exit," Eddie whines. Richie suppresses a yell, withholds the urge to kick a wall and break his foot. 

"I think we're going to die." 

Within ten minutes, they're packed, weaponized, and shimmying down a pipe where the least zombies are. Conveniently, this is by the edge of a forest, where they can climb trees to hide from zombies or disappear from plain sight. 

"Hate to see us leave, love to watch you go," Richie whispers to Eddie, who has gone first. 

"Fall on your face," Eddie returns as Richie shimmies on down after him, an axe strapped to his back. He used to think it was all like a video game. These days he tries not to think. So he doesn't think as he runs through the zombies, beheading them as best he can, and he doesn't wince anymore when he sees Eddie (his Eddie, cute Eddie, innocent Eddie, deserves better Eddie) knocking them to the ground. The zombies don't bleed, they just tear like they're paper or rubber. It's easy to forget what they once were. And when there's a clearing, he doesn't think about it, he just takes Eddie's hand and makes for the trees like some sort of cryptid (and humans do seem to be the cryptids now, at least the living breathing humans). 

Nothing is following them. The forest is silent. Eddie's breathing heavily, releasing Richie's hand to tightly the aspirator that has been empty for years. 

"That was real fucking lucky," Eddie says, his voice still hushed. "Too fucking lucky." And of course, it's then that he sees it, amongst the trees- not Bigfoot, maybe a zombie. 

"Eddie…" Richie says. "Clown." Eddie's eyebrows furrow, he turns his head, and he's falling to the ground before Richie remembers himself. Angry (and horribly scared seeing Eddie lying on the dirt), Richie swings the axe, but the clown is faster, so much faster. 

***

When Richie comes to, he desperately wants to be knocked out again, because quite frankly he is not in the mood for all of this. He can see the iron bars of a cage, and the concrete walls outside of that. When he looks around, Eddie, just about coming to himself, blinking rapidly in those moments of blissful laziness before he realizes where he is, is next to him, also behind these bars, as well as five other people, which is more survivors than Richie has ever seen since this all began. 

(Though it looks like they're not survivors anymore.)

"What the fuck is going on?" Eddie shrieks when he pieces together the situation. "Richie?" Richie lets the smaller man barrell into him and cling onto his stained shirt. 

"There was a clown," Richie recalls. "Looks like we ran away to join the circus."

"Oh, there's nothing funny," one of the strangers- the woman- says. She's leaning against the wall. Her red hair is a tangled mess, and all the strands seem to be different lengths. "He just wants to eat you. Shame, I never had any clowns at any birthday parties as a kid." 

"Sorry, he wants to what?" Eddie's eyes are wide. He looks younger again. 

"Eat you," she repeats. The nonchalance is almost convincing. Richie wonders who she's trying to be brave for until he notices the man with a lot of excess skin (you couldn't really be too large anymore) clinging to her hand like it's a life-ring. 

"In a non-kinky way?" Richie jokes. "Lame." A taller man with curly hair and a sort-of miserable, stone-set face scoffs. 

"This isn't a situation to make light of," he seems agitated. Richie's good at that, agitating people. The black man rests a hand on the agitated man's shoulder and this seems to be a relaxing gesture. 

"Leave it, Stan," the black man says quietly. 

"Yeah, leave it, Stan," Richie echoes. 

"Richie, shut up," Eddie hisses, lightly swatting him. "Can someone explain more, please? This is kind of a lot." 

The last man, who has been sitting curled up on the floor at the corner of the cage, raises his head. There are bags under his eyes, and he's incredibly pale. Immediately it's clear that he's been in this cage a while, away from the sunlight. Richie figures that makes him the leader of this band of no-longer-survivors, so he listens. 

"We don't really know all that much," the man on the floor begins, speaking with a stutter. "The clown- Bob Gray, he told me his name is- Bob, he doesn't let us know much. But he's a survivor like us all, but he's surviving by being just like those things, really. Though I think he maybe lived like that before, anyway. 

"I do know that he lures you to him, to the forest. He brings the zombies to you so you have no choice but to hide out in the forest, but the forest is his domain. He thinks he's God here. He got me and Juh-juh-juh-" the man seems to give up on his word here- "my little brother about a month ago. He killed my brother and he made me- he- we have to eat. I've seen plenty others come. No one escapes.

"We don't know how he chooses who's next. I'm not sure I want to know, but I'm not sure if there's really any reasoning around it anyway. He's an insane son of a bitch. But he's smart. We're trapped here, basically. Doomed." 

Richie wonders if they've all heard this speech too many times, because they seem pretty depressed as the man speaks, and far too resigned. 

"Well that's a shit attitude to have," Eddie declares, making Richie grin despite himself. 

"My little spitfire," he coos, but it isn't the time, so he looks to this group of fellow fucked-over barely-twenty-year-olds, and does his best to get into their souls. "I'm not dying here. I don't wanna get vored by some man in face paint." The woman and the black man seem amused by that. Amusement is always a good sign. 

"Hey, Bev, what was it you said when you first got here, what, four days ago?" Agitated man, Stan, asks. 

"That I'd get us all out of here," the woman, Bev, apparently, sighs. "Stan, there's like seven of us. It's not impossible."

"Yeah, remember what I promised you," the black man encourages. "I'm not letting you die here." It seems like a sweet moment, but Richie doesn’t really know them. 

“I don’t think that’s our choice, Mike.” 

“You’re a real Debbie Downer, Stan the Man,” Richie says. 

“Don’t start fights,” the maybe-leader interrupts before Stan or Mike or Bev can respond. “We can’t fight each other. That’s stupid.” For the man sitting on the floor, he seems to have a lot of sway. 

“When my shadow reaches the back legs of the chair in front of us,” the one who seems to love Bev says, “the clown comes in. Every day, without fail.” It’s a smart observation, but the man doesn’t seem to know where to go from there, self-conscious with so many eyes fixed on him. “If that helps.”

“You’re a genius, Ben,” Bev tells him, and Richie sees how she squeezes his hand. Richie fiddles with his ring. “We can be prepared.”

“We’re on the other side of a cage,” Eddie points out, which is less observant than Ben’s comment. “Knowing when that fucknut comes in doesn’t mean we’re at an advantage.” 

“I’m pretty sure seven people can outsmart one psycho!” Mike encourages. “We’ve got this.” It’s directed at everyone, but he’s looking quite pointedly at Stan. “And if we fail… what’s he going to do? Kill us?” 

***

The clown comes, and Richie gets a proper look at him. Somehow, this man has got a steady supply of face paint coming in, the white paint smeared over skin, his own fingerprints showing in it. The red paint, however, looks somewhat like it might not be paint, and Richie tries not to think about the possible fate of being a weird jagged line across this cocksucking clown’s stupid face. His eyes seem impossibly blue, inhumanely blue, and in a non-romantic way Richie can see himself getting lost in those eyes. There’s a grin splattered across the clown’s face, and all his teeth are long and jagged and brown, like a rotting shark’s, or that fish with the light on its head in ‘Finding Nemo’. There’s a tray in his hands, with seven bowls, brown slop dribbling over the sides of them. Even if Richie didn’t know what was in there, he reckons he’d want to hurl. 

“Fuck you,” the man who had been sitting (Bill, Richie knows now) snaps before the clown can even speak, which makes Bob Gray (Boob Gay, Richie kind of wants to call him) laugh. 

“S-sorry, B-b-b-billy, we’re all out of Georgie now,” the clown says. Nobody reacts as Bill runs up the bars of the cage, shaking them, distressed. 

“You’re one ugly motherfucker, aren’t you?” Richie announces, keeping a smile on, the cocky one. “No wonder you have to kill people to get them _ in _you.”

“Richie, don’t,” Eddie demands quietly, eyes fixed on the clown, lips barely moving, like a ventriloquist. Bob Gray leaves the bowls on the floor by the cage. 

“Eat,” he commands. Nobody moves. “Eat!” 

“I’m a vegetarian,” Mike says, looking like he’s done it without thinking. 

“Yeah, I ate before I came, so,” Bev adds. 

“I’m on a diet,” Ben contributes, less confidently.

“Eat,” the clown repeats one more time, a sinister glare in his bright eyes, blazing like Hades’ hair in that Disney movie. Mumbling what sounds like bird types under his breath, Stan, head bowed, sort of tiptoes to the edge of the cage, grabbing the bowls and bringing them through the bars, passing them out like a soup kitchen. Before Richie can warn him, Stan is reaching his hand out further to get the last bowl, and Bob Gray is lowering his boot onto the man’s hand. The bones crunch (it’s like stepping on a handful of dry cereal) and Stan screams, loudly. “Next time, you all listen to me. Unless you want to end up like Juh-juh-juh-Georgie.” Though they’re supposed to end up like that anyway. Trembling, Stan brings the last bowl through, and Mike tends to him immediately, like a strong-but-gentle giant. 

When Richie looks down into his bowl, he isn’t so sure he wants to eat. The flesh is white, like pork or chicken, floating around in a thick brown broth that looks like sewage waste. It’s hot, and Richie hasn’t had a proper hot meal in five years, or any type of meat. 

“‘Ardly a Sunday roast, guvna,” Richie says quietly to himself, and the voice makes him feel better. His ring clangs against the bowl. With a sudden, strong, burst of bravery, Eddie speaks out. 

“Yeah, I’m not eating this shit, Ronald McDonald,” Eddie refuses. With almost superhuman speed, the cage door is unlocked, then locked again, and Richie has an arm wrapped around his throat, right against the windpipe. He doesn’t even have the chance to laugh at Eddie’s joke. 

“Oh?” Bob Gray’s ugly clown voice sounds even worse from this angle. This must be how Saul and Moses and all those sorts felt, Richie thinks. It’s like Jane Eyre and Rochester, even- a disembodied voice, though Richie’s feeling no love towards it. “Would you rather have your husband _ in you _?!” Curse the clown, he’s stolen Richie’s joke. He sees Eddie staring up at the clown, terror and contempt in his eyes. 

As Eddie makes a big show of raising the bowl to his lips, Bill is sneaking up behind Bob Gray, his own bowl in his hands, though Richie can’t see him. He hears the shatter of the bowl though, and can feel the warmth of the bits of broth that are landing on his shoulders and hair, and he certainly feels it when the clown releases him and thuds to the floor. Eddie’s grin is face-splitting. 

“My plan worked!” Bill says, stutterless, sounding surprised, though no one else there doubted him. 

“Let’s kill this fucking clown,” Richie manages to rasp, spinning towards the clown and kicking him in the head as he begins to stand up again. 

In a flurry of punches and kicks, the seven survivors are really beating down on Bob Gray, who suddenly seems small and pathetic, the white face paint smearing, revealing someone who is just a man underneath. If he’d manage to stand, he’d walk with more of a limp than those rotting cunts outside, Richie thinks. When he hears the man below them choke when Stan of all people stomps on his chest, he grins. He grins again when one of his own blows gets a satisfying crunch as he breaks Bob Gray’s nose. Eddie’s kicks probably have the least force behind them, but he’s incessant, a bundle of energy and Richie’s heart soars. He almost fiddles with his ring. Bill, too, is weak, having been locked inside a cage for a month, but he’s fuelled with the most anger, probably, and he’s yelling something about his brother but Richie can’t really hear him over the sound of his own head and a dying man. Bev seems pleased enough to be standing near the delicates; she’s pleased enough, at least, to be creating a nice large bloodstain at the crotch of the clown costume. And Mike’s stomped on one of the hands, though he seems more hesitant to hurt anybody, but he breaks those bones, a sort of justice. Ben, too, is less vigorous, maybe, but there’s clear knowledge about what Bob Gray has probably been doing for more than five years and hatred of that, and he lets out these grunts as he hurts the man who thought he was a zombie. 

None of them are really sure when Bob Gray dies, but he does, and the moment ends probably not long after that. They’re bloodsoaked and tired and even slightly embarrassed about what they’ve done, catching their breath and staring down at the body in the middle of their circle.

“We gotta get rid of his head,” Ben reminds them. “Don’t want him coming back.” 

“Well, I’m not the Incredible fucking Hulk,” Richie complains. “We can’t just, like, twist it off. Where’s he keep our stuff?” 

“Uh, we can always use the bits of broken bowl?” Bev suggests. “Just, you know, brainstorming. I know that’s a bit slow.” 

“Just lock him in,” Bill commands, and they listen, Mike grimacing as he takes the bloody key from the body. It’s not every day a killer gets countless life sentences to be served after the death penalty. “Let’s go.” 

“Do you think there’s a shower here?” Eddie asks as they leave the room with the cage.

“Do you really think that man is- was- civilised?” Stan replies. “Besides, there hasn’t been any running water for five years.” 

“I know,” Eddie sighs. Richie wraps his arms around his apocalypse-husband, feeling clingy now. 

“I’d lick you clean,” Richie assures him, which leaves him getting grossed-out glares from Eddie and Stan, while Bev laughs from a few feet ahead, where she and Ben are in the lead, about to turn into a new room. 

***

Soon enough, they find a medical kit in a room with a sofa. As Mike wraps up Stan’s broken hand, Bill attaches the key from the cage to a piece of string, which he ties around his neck. 

“Hey,” Bev calls out, and Richie looks away from Eddie, looking to Bev, who’s holding a large knife, closer to a machete, with a fancy hilt, decorated with a bunch of stones. “Found our stuff.” With ease she flips the knife in her hand, and Richie isn’t surprised by her owning it. Everybody hurries towards her, eager to feel themselves again, and to feel safe. 

Everything is in a large yellow tub, and everything has to be taken out carefully, since most of the possessions people have in this world are weapons. 

“Batilda!” Richie exclaims joyously, and passes his dear old friend to Eddie before retrieving the axe, too. There’s a tenderness to the way Mike takes hold of a small whistle carved from wood. He blows it (haha, Richie mentally laughs) and a bird-call is sounded, making Stan startle before he smiles softly towards Mike. He grabs a second one and passes it to Stan- they’re signals, Richie supposes. The two definitely seem close (in an eyebrow-wiggling way), so it’s no shock to decipher that the clown took them at the same time. 

“He really was sick,” Mike says. “This stuff… they were trophies.” It’s at this point that Bill is staring down into the box, looking ready to vomit. Unable to help his curiosity, Richie peers in, and sees a paper boat sitting at the bottom of the box. Bill snatches it away, putting it in the pocket of his jacket. 

“I don’t want to stay here any longer,” he says. “I’m going. Are you guys…?” 

They are. (Joining him, that is. As much as Richie loves Eddie, he reckons he’d go mad as a clown trapped with one person for what’s left of eternity.) 

***

“My family owned a farm,” Mike tells them all as they walk through the forest. He’s still holding the bird-whistle, and in the other hand he’s holding Stan’s good hand. There’s a slight slouch to his posture that wasn’t there in the cage. “I used to hate seeing the animals all locked up, trapped in, well, a cage. Once, I tried freeing all of the sheep. My daddy, he got them all again pretty quick. But it was a rush, a good rush. I’d done something good.” 

“You’re the best person I know, Mike,” Stan replies, so quietly that Richie can barely hear him. “Always.” 

They camp out beneath a cypress tree. Richie helps Mike start a fire before collapsing against the trunk, enjoying the rough feel of the bark against his back through his shirt. 

“He said you were Eddie’s husband,” Ben says all of a sudden, somewhat hushed. Richie blinks at him. “Are you guys really married?” There’s a pointed look he gives towards Bev and Richie smirks. 

“Owo?” He regrets letting that leave his mouth, but it’s already gone. “Well, we’re apocalypse-married. Find some rings, remember what vows you can. Who’s left to tell you you didn’t do it proper?” 

“Apocalypse-married,” Ben repeats. “The world’s gone to shit.” Hearing him swear feels wrong, as infantalising as Richie knows that is. 

“Love is still the same,” Richie tries to comfort him, and he’s shocked by how wise he sounds himself. 

“Yeah, I guess it is,” Ben smiles slightly, seeming more relaxed. “You know, Eddie seemed really scared once that clown had a hold on you, even though that was the plan. It was nice to see. There’s humanity left in the world, left in us.” 

***

Richie dreams of blood on his shoes, and he wakes up kicking. Bill’s on watch duty, said he would take the entire night. They stare at each other, eye’s glossy in the dark. After a moment, Bill opens a hesitant mouth, trying to figure out how to comfort him, but he doesn’t need to; Eddie takes his hand and yanks him back down next to him before resting his head over Richie’s chest, still holding his hand. Richie uses his other hand to run it through Eddie’s curls. 

“You’re fine,” Eddie whispers. “You’re fine.” 

In the morning, they’ll keep on walking. There isn’t anything else to do. They’ll walk as much as they can and find an old store and take some supplies and kill some zombies on the way, because that’s what survivors do. They aren’t living dead yet. They’re still human. They’ll go to sleep and have bad dreams, and they’ll get up again and do it all over again. That’s surviving. At least, Richie thinks, as sleep starts to take him again, his hand slowing in Eddie’s hair, he isn’t alone. That makes surviving that bit more survivable.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Hope you liked it, understand but would rather not know if you didn't :p


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